House majority leader Kevin McCarthy's abrupt exit from the race for the House speakership, coming shortly after John Boehner's only slightly less abrupt decision to quit the job, confirms that the Speaker's post as defined by the House Republican Caucus is no longer meaningful and that this Republican-led House of Representatives is no longer functional.

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These two realities, even if they are rarely acknowledged by political and media elites, tell us more about the sorry state of the Republican Party than anything that is happening in an admittedly awkward and unsettling race for the party's presidential nomination.

A party that once engaged in the hard work of governing -- with a sense of responsibility, and often with success -- is now so at odds with the very idea of functional governance that it struggles to contribute anything more than the word "no."

Boehner's plan to exit at the end of October, and McCarthy's inability even to pick up the outgoing Speaker's broken baton, represents another triumph for an extremist inclination that has redefined the party's congressional and presidential politics. This inclination is more anarchical than traditional, more cutthroat than conservative.

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It does not really matter who wins what Congressman Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, calls a "brand new race for speaker." The Republican Party's mayhem has become so debilitating that the mayhem now defines the position more than the occupant.

The Grand Old Party has become the Party of Chaos. And the extent of that chaos--as evidenced by the inability of its House caucus to manage the speakership--offers a profound measure of the extent to which the Republican Party has abandoned its founding promise and its historical mission.

The first Republican Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Prentice Banks of Massachusetts, took charge of the chamber less than two years after the founding of the party and immediately shook up the politics of the country by installing anti-slavery congressmen in key positions. In the most contentious of times, however, he operated as a man of the House, working with all factions, encouraging open debate, and generally making the chamber work. Indeed, former Speaker Howell Cobb, a Georgia Democrat with whom Banks had no agreement on the critical issues of the day, said the Republican was "in all respects the best presiding officer [the House] had ever seen."

The Republican speakers who followed Banks tended to operate as men of the House, which made a good deal of sense, as Republicans were from the Civil War era to the time of the New Deal a steady (if not constant) "natural party of government." That did not mean that these Speakers were invariably perfect, nor invariably appealing, men. They were often conservative; yet they tended to be more enlightened than the Southern segregationists and big-city machine Democrats with whom they had to contend. They made the House work, every bit as well and in some case better than did the Democrats.

There's a good deal of evidence that Boehner would have liked to govern in that style, and that the hapless McCarthy might have been similarly inclined.

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But those days are gone.

McCarthy's collapse, which included a disastrous introduction to America as a hyper-partisan who effectively acknowledged the political purpose of the targeting of Hillary Clinton by the House's select committee on Benghazi, is less worthy of attention than the decision of Boehner to quit.

McCarthy should never had risen as high as he did in the House caucus, and he could never have been an effective leader. That's why he is out before he got in.

Boehner, though hardly a giant in congressional terms, is a different story. He is a more consequential figure than McCarthy, and his surrender reveals the extent of the chaos and the crisis that the GOP is now experiencing.

A product of the Ohio legislature in the 1980s, when Midwestern Republicans retained the "build-big-things" and ... "build-big-coalitions" mentality of governors such as Ohio's Jim Rhodes and Michigan's William Milliken, Boehner was a genuine social and economic conservative. But he accepted that conservatives had to operate on an ideological spectrum and within legislative chambers that only functioned if Republicans and Democrats had the freedom to cooperate. After his election to Congress in 1990 (when he beat a conservative icon who had gone off the rails, Donald "Buz" Lukens, a wild and contentious primary that I had a chance to follow closely as a young reporter for the Toledo Blade) he quickly moved into House leadership.

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.